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Most easily read in RICH TEXT

Thirty-fourth and thirty–fifth

2013

Five-Day Training Intensives

Biographic-Narrative-Interpretive Method :

BNIM

Narrative Interview and Interpretation

5 days for 6 people:

2013 January 31st-Feb 1st, and then Monday-Wednesday February 4th to 6th

2013 June 13th -14th , and then Monday-Wednesday June 17th to 19th

24a Princes Avenue, London N10 3LR

Muswell Hill, North London, United Kingdom

Even if you’ve had this message before, it’s still true!

The value of open-narrative interviewing and insightful interpretation is widely recognised, but rather than having to invent the wheel for themselves, many people welcome a systematic textbook-backed, tutor-backed, immersion into principles and procedures that have been shown over two decades and many countries to generate constantly high-quality work.

For over twelve years in the UK and in Ireland, as well as in Auckland (NZ), Ljubljana (Slovenia), New York (USA), Sydney (Australia), Grand Canaries (Spain), Coimbra (Portugal) we have been running BNIM intensive trainings designed for PhD students and for postdoctoral researchers (both individuals and also research teams) for use in various pure and applied fields. Comments include:

Elvin – A richness beyond what I could imagine.

Sasha - thank you, for a wonderful training course. I learnt so much - and it was a great experience for us all as a team, and in terms of all of our intellectual and skills development.

Mark – I could go away and practice now. I liked the balance of how and why. I really got my head round that and could explain it to someone else.

An excerpt from an email we received from one university may be suggestive:

“… a number of the trainees who graduated this year got top awards in their doctorate projects... BNIM and narrative projects were considered to be of a particularly high standard by both internal and external examiners, and were very well received. The course director was very impressed and has told me that the standard of the research of those undertaking these projects [using BNIM] has improved the standard of the whole cohort.”

Already completed PhDs, clinical doctorates, and a few MA theses by researchers using BNIM now number 59, and we know of at least another 30 PhDs, clinical doctorates and post-doctoral research projects in process. There may well be others. The trend is rising sharply. 23 were submitted in the eight years between 2001 and 2009: 30 more were submitted just in the three years between 2009 and 2011.

A very few of the topics covered: the culture of motor bikers; reintegration of returning Guatemalan refugees; identity in informal care; men coping with sexual abuse; psychoanalytic study of breast cancer; love and intimacy; motivation in occupational therapy; nurses’ and health visitors’ learning and their professional practices; relationship experiences in psychosis (such as those of, and with, hearing voices people) and hospitalisation; migration; female aboriginal head teachers in Australia; students on different types of degree and training programmes; fishing practices in Uganda, treatment decisions around and experiences of the elderly in hospitals; memories of wars, military occupations, and massacres; midwife experiences; children in orphanages, intergenerational transmission; the cultures of innovative organisations;

Increasing numbers of post-doctoral funded collective research projects use BNIM (details in the free BNIM Short Guide and Detailed Manual).

Anglophone universities involved include Auckland (NZ), Belfast, Birkbeck College, Birmingham, Central Lancashire, Dublin (Ireland) , de Montfort, East Anglia, East London, Essex, Exeter, National University of Ireland (Ireland),, Idaho (USA), Indiana (USA), Kings College London, Leeds, Leicester, Manchester, Massey (NZ), Middlesex, Oxford, Oxford Brookes, Plymouth, Sussex, Queens University Belfast, Vilnius (Lithuania)

BNIM assumes that “narrative” expresses both conscious concerns and unconscious cultural, societal and individual presuppositions and processes. Integrally psycho-societal, it supports research into the lived experience and reflexivity of individuals and collectives, situated subjectivity, facilitating understanding both the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ worlds of ‘historically-evolving persons-in-historically-evolving situations’, and particularly the expectedly surprising interactivity of inner and outer world dynamics.

It especially serves researchers who want to think psycho-societally and who need a tool that supports understanding spanning sociological and psychological dynamics and structures, and these treated not statically but as situated, affected and active historically and biographically.

For some examples of BNIM case studies, some in areas with which you might well be concerned, see maybe the European Union 7-country SOSTRIS project Biography and social exclusion in Europe: experiences and life-journeys (2002: Bristol, Policy Press). Other books, articles, reports etc. are listed in the Bibliography A of the BNIM Short Guide (and Detailed Manual), electronic copy free on request.

BNIM research provides an innovative base for policy review and for better policy, and for professional practice, and the upgrading of existing theory and case-description practices

When you do the course, you automatically become a member of the <Biographic-narrative-BNIM> email list where news, questions and discussion circulate. Innovative and advanced methodology can be lonely without a secure base and contact with like-minded people working in the same way as you.

The course, the textbook, the free and constantly updated BNIM Short Guide and Detailed Manual and the email list (currently around 350 strong) all offer you support in using part or all of the BNIM tool-kit in your own work and for liaising with others.

Summary of the 5-day BNIM-intensive

Designed for PhD students and professional researchers, the course provides a thorough training in doing BNIM biographic narrative interviews, together with ‘hands-on experience’ of following BNIM interpretation procedures. Students develop a sense of how their own research projects might use such aspects and components.

With two tutors (Tom Wengraf and Mariya Stoilova) , we ensure close coaching and support for the intensive work that is needed for you to fully acquire both the understanding of principles and also the practical capacity for proceeding with the systematic procedures involved in BNIM – usable both for BNIM but also for other types of narrative interviewing and interpretation.

You will be expected to have looked at chapters 6 and 12 of Tom’s textbook, Qualitative research interviewing: biographic narrative and semi-structured method (2001: Sage Publications). Before the course starts, you are expected to have studied some bits and scanned others of the most recent version of the BNIM Short Guide and Detailed Manual which will be sent to your email address.

Your previous preparing-by-reading means that most of your time can be spent on clarification and practical exercises during the 5 days, learning-by-doing-and-discussing.

Programme (subject to revision) for 5-day intensives

Thursday and Friday - interviewing

We start with a short introduction to the Biographic-narrative-interpretive method, the history of its development, and to the principles behind its practice. The point and timing of using open-ended biographic narrative interviews rather than (only) the more conventional semi-structured and attitude-and-argument focused ones is clarified. You get to see the value of the 3 quite different subsessions. The bulk of the first two days is then almost entirely devoted to learning the craft of BNIM interviewing practice. This involves learning to ask narrative-pointed questions (both open and also focused) and not inadvertently interrupting or deflecting the interviewee. Apparently simple, it rapidly becomes clear that such a craft requires repeated and carefully-(self)-monitored practice to be successfully achieved. Repeated interview practice exercises and discussion ensure such success is achieved before the end of the 2nd day.

Monday to Wednesday – interpreting , and theorising from cases

We outline the principles and you engage in the key practices of BNIM interpretive work . We explain the importance of the twin interpretive tracks of ‘living of the lived life’ and ‘telling of the told story’ analysis, and micro-analysis, and how you convert the raw transcript into two series of processed data for each track. You learn the significance of the future-blind chunk-by-chunk approach peculiar to BNIM by practice – by doing parts of a narrative text analysis, a micro-analysis and biographical data analysis. You see the value of bringing the separated tracks together in an integrated ‘case account’. Finally, on the basis of case-presentations, you practice systematic case-comparison and the generalising and particularising theorising towards which BNIM work is typically oriented.

The course ends with our looking again at how you might best use all or part of the BNIM approach within your individual research projects, and, given the existence of sceptical research and applied policy audiences, how to defend your choice to use such an in-depth biographical research method with a necessarily low-N sample.

After the course, post-course support

To help you avoid unnecessary errors when you start to practice BNIM yourself, we continue to advise on your eventual design of an open-narrative question (the SQUIN) for your pilot interviews, and then – if you wish – we give feedback on your first transcript and then on its initial data-processing for subsequent interpretation.

The tuition fees for the 5-day intensive training (including the important post-course ‘initial support’ mentioned above) are earlybird £825 (or £925 afterwards) for the January 2013 – June 2013 courses. [Further Tutorial Feedback up to the level of the Case-Account is now also available for those who have completed the training].

CONTACT

For a free digital copy of the most recently updated version of the BNIM Short Guide bound with the BNIM Detailed Manual, or